Description:
Reference #1324:
The University of South Carolina is offering licensing opportunities for Analytical Global-Local (AGL) Prediction of Guided Wave Scattering from Discontinuities
Background:
The basic principle of using guided Lamb waves for damage detection in structural health monitoring (SHM) applications of a structure is based on the investigation of the incident, reflection, transmitted waves, and mode conversion of Lamb wave modes as they interact with damage. The interaction of Lamb waves with damage is a complex phenomenon. Existing discontinuity in the structure (e.g., a stiffener or a notch) makes the physics of wave propagation more complicated. Development of a highly efficient computational model for guided wave propagation and interaction with damage is in urgent need for structural health monitoring applications
Invention Description:
This invention presents an efficient analytical global-local (AGL) method based on the physics of Lamb wave propagation for detecting a crack in a complex structure. The AGL method provides the exact Lamb wave solution for the simulation of Lamb wave propagation and interaction with discontinuity.
Potential Applications:
The present AGL method is a highly computational efficient simulation approach over conventional FEM analysis with high novelty, which allows conducting virtual experiments for complex structural health monitoring applications.
This approach was applied to a real-life problem for detecting a horizontal crack in a stiffened plate. Multiple cases were considered for distinguishing scattered wave from a crack, using a plate with a pristine stiffener and using a plate with a cracked stiffener.
Advantages and Benefits:
For calculating scattering coefficients from a discontinuity using commercial finite element method (FEM) method, harmonic analysis is needed. FEM provides scattered wave fields, and additional postprocessing of data is required to obtain scattering coefficients. Traditional FEM method (harmonic analysis) requires high computational effort to achieve computational accuracy and computational speed, which is associated with computational cost.
This AGL approach can do the same job in real time with very little computational effort. This makes it usable for in-situ damage detection and identification application.